Peter Jackson

You can now precisely mark your calendars, Hobbit fans. Peter Jackson's final film in the trilogy will be released July 18, 2014, with the title “The Hobbit: There and Back Again.” Initially, the director had planned two movies based on J.R.R. Tolkien's popular masterpiece, but this summer he decided there was enough material for a third movie. The first film in the trilogy, “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey,” opens this year on Dec. 14.  The second installment will be called “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug,” and will be released a year later, on Dec. 13, 2013.   Shot in 3-D, at 48 frames-per-second, the trilogy of films will be released in High Frame Rate (HFR)

Mike Hopkins, 53, an Academy Award-winning sound editor who worked on the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, died Sunday in a rafting accident in New Zealand. Hopkins drowned when his inflatable raft capsized during a flash flood in a river on New Zealand's North Island, police Senior Sgt. Carolyn Watson said. His wife, Nicci, survived. The New Zealand Herald newspaper quoted "Rings" director Peter Jackson as saying many actors, directors and film crew members who were lucky enough to work with Hopkins would miss him deeply.

By one standard, the $84.8 million in receipts over the weekend for Peter Jackson's first crack at "The Hobbit"  was a success. The 3-D film about Bilbo Baggins' unexpected journey was, as box-office pundits reminded us, the biggest-ever opening for a December release. And the film's "A" CinemaScore suggested the fans got what they came for. But there was also plenty lacking. Pre-release estimates had the New Line/Warner Bros/MGM movie (budgeted at a whopping $250 million)

One might assume that a story already covered by a trilogy of documentaries, numerous books, countless articles and with a trail of celebrity supporters including Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder and Natalie Maines had already earned enough attention. The young men known as the West Memphis Three - Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley - became modern-day folk heroes as the story of their imprisonment over the graphic, sensational 1993 murders of three 8-year-old boys in West Memphis, Ark., spread during their nearly two decades in jail.

THERE'S a moment about 45 minutes into Peter Jackson's "King Kong," as the "motion-picture ship" the Venture approaches the fog-shrouded shores of Skull Island, when Jimmy (Jamie Bell), the youngest member of the crew, looks up from his copy of Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" with a troubled look and says, "It's not an adventure story, is it, Mr. Hayes?" To which the grave first-mate Hayes (Evan Parke) replies categorically, "No, Jimmy, it's not."

When director Peter Jackson was a boy, the neighbors enjoyed the Super8 films he shot in his backyard. Now, with the rest of the world watching his movies, the backyard is bigger and surrounded by taller fences. Each Sunday, tourist buses trundle through this tiny coastal suburb of the country's capital, Wellington, the passengers eager for the slightest sign of their hero.

For director Peter Jackson, the time was "seven years that's got one week left to run." The seven years was how long he had worked on "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy while the "one week left" was his acknowledgment that he'd soon have to stop tinkering with the last installment, "The Return of the King."

Peter Jackson first tried to remake the film "King Kong" at age 13 -- using a cardboard model of the Empire State Building, a bedsheet painted with a New York backdrop and his Super 8 film camera. How times have changed. New Zealand's Jackson, now 40 and with three Oscars for the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, said the star-studded, multimillion-dollar remake will have some major changes from the 1933 original.

"LISTEN," says tough-talking filmmaker Carl Denham, and everybody does. "I'm going out and make the greatest picture in the world, something that nobody's ever seen or heard of. You'll have to think up a whole lot of new adjectives when I come back." Denham didn't come back with a movie, he came back with a gorilla as big as the Ritz, but "King Kong," the motion picture Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.

When Universal's "The Frighteners" arrives in theaters Friday, studio executives will be paying close attention to see just how much high-tech frightening can be achieved on a mere $38 million. The R-rated black comedy-thriller, starring Michael J. Fox as "psychic investigator" Frank Bannister, was made here by Kiwi director Peter Jackson, who co-wrote the movie with Fran Walsh, his partner on and off the job.

By one standard, the $84.8 million in receipts over the weekend for Peter Jackson's first crack at "The Hobbit"  was a success. The 3-D film about Bilbo Baggins' unexpected journey was, as box-office pundits reminded us, the biggest-ever opening for a December release. And the film's "A" CinemaScore suggested the fans got what they came for. But there was also plenty lacking. Pre-release estimates had the New Line/Warner Bros/MGM movie (budgeted at a whopping $250 million)

Opinions about “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” are all over the board. Yet even people who aren't  that keen on the first entry in Peter Jackson's film trilogy have been struck by one scene in particular - the meeting between Bilbo Baggins ( Martin Freeman ) and Gollum (Andy Serkis) - which was improved dramatically by huge leaps in technology. When Jackson depicted Gollum in his three “Lord of the Rings” movies, Serkis' performance was recorded months after principal photography on his scenes had wrapped, with Serkis acting the scenes all by himself.

Although the first installment of Peter Jackson's three-film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy novel "The Hobbit" carries the subtitle "An Unexpected Journey," it wasn't entirely unexpected that the director would revisit Middle-earth after the worldwide success of his "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. This time around, however, Jackson may have gotten off on the wrong foot. Early reviews of "The Hobbit" were lukewarm on the padded story and the new high-frame-rate technology being used to project the film in some theaters, and many top critics are now chiming in with similar opinions.

From an artistic point of view, star Mary Pickford famously said, "It would have been more logical if silent pictures had grown out of the talking instead of the other way around. " Likewise, it would have been better all around if Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" films had not come before his new, three-part version of "The Hobbit. " It's not just that the 1937 J.R.R. Tolkien novel, which he began as a simple bedtime story for his children, was written first and covers events that precede the considerably more complex "Rings" story.

In the wake of the stellar success of Peter Jackson's adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, which grossed more than $2.9 billion worldwide and won a slew of awards, it's no shock that the New Zealand filmmaker would eventually turn to Tolkien's other beloved fantasy tale set in the familiar realm of Middle-earth, "The Hobbit. " More surprising was the decision to stretch the lean book into three separate films, starting with "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," opening Dec. 14. Early reviews indicate that while this first new installment does recapture much of Jackson's Middle-earth magic, it also feels padded (which it is, drawing heavily on Tolkien's appendices to the "Rings" books)

Click here to download TV listings for the week Dec. 2 - 8 in PDF format This week's TV Movies     CBS This Morning CEO Mark Pincus, Zynga. (N) 7 a.m. KCBS Today Elijah Wood; Paula Deen. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC Good Morning America Mia Hamm; Gerard Butler; Tyler Florence; Lori Bergamotto. (N) 7 a.m. KABC Live With Kelly and Michael Elijah Wood; Kelly auditions for the ballet; Katherine Jenkins performs. (N) 9 a.m. KABC The View Guest co-host Jenny McCarthy; Jane Seymour; Bonnie Raitt.

He's described locally as a "genius masquerading as an ordinary person," a creative whirlwind, financial powerhouse and folk hero rolled into one. Yet even that can't quite measure the effect "The Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson has had on his native country. Certainly, when one of the world's smaller countries, New Zealand (population 3.8 million), snags one of the biggest deals in cinema history, it's bound to stir things up.

Peter Jackson has scored a legal victory in his battle with New Line Cinema over the accounting of "The Lord of the Rings," with a federal magistrate hitting the studio with $125,000 in sanctions for failing to produce potential evidence. Jackson is suing New Line, contending that he had not received a fair and proper accounting of the first "Lord of the Rings" film's income, including DVD sales and foreign receipts.

When you're a “Lord of the Rings” superfan, it pays to have your own talk show. On Monday “The Colbert Report” will kick off “Hobbit Week,” with guest appearances from the cast and crew of the upcoming “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” -- Sir Ian McKellan, Martin Freeman, Peter Jackson and Andy Serkis. It's bound to be an exciting time for Colbert, who's made no secret of his obsession with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien and is also rumored to make a cameo in the film.

"The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" had its long-expected party in Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand, on Wednesday. Thousands of fans lined the blocks-long red carpet to greet director Peter Jackson and his cast of dwarfs, hobbits and wizards. Wellington's Embassy Theater was decorated to look like a hobbit house as cast members Martin Freeman, Cate Blanchett, Andy Serkis and Hugo Weaving in addition to Gandalf's band of dwarfs soaked in the fan adoration. Director James Cameron and his wife, Suzy Amis, also attended the event.